Students Can Use Internet To Rent Textbooks Rather Than Buy Them
The college textbook racket is a cruel exploitation of a captive market, and book prices seem to rise faster than Google stock.
In my day we just bought the books we were told to buy and were grateful when the bookstore handed us back pennies on the dollar during end-of-semester buybacks. But now rental sites such as Chegg, BookRenter and CampusBookRentals are there to help today's whippersnappers bypass the process and become only marginally screwed by the astronomical price of textbooks. The sites offer perks that include massive savings and free return shipping:
Talk radio host Clark Howard wrote a little diatribe declaring the textbook system broken and offering Chegg as analternative:
certain schools take kickbacks from book publishers for mandating that students use custom-edition textbooks. The production runs on these custom texts are small enough to be targeted for specific university courses.
These "boutique" books — which may excise certain material or add a professor's published papers — come embossed with a warning that it's illegal to sell back as a used book. The campus book stores are, of course, complicit because they refuse to buy these books from students.
If these online renters become more popular, you'd think publishers would be forced to drop their prices in order to compete.
Chegg.com a new resource for renting textbooks [Clark Howard]
(Photo: strobist)
(Thanks, Glenn!)
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Comments:
i'll stick with used and from half.com
Amazon also has great used textbooks.
I studied the textbook market (used and new) as my undergrad senior thesis. Just buy used textbooks. Unless your professor is assigning homework out of the textbook, buy an old edition--they are practically free. And always check for International editions. They are far cheaper than even used "domestic" books. The cover might be in Chinese, but the text is always in English.
@babyruthless: India also has heavily discounted versions of the exact same text as the US version (as told to me by one of my professors who wrote a text book).
It's a good idea and I'm sure the service will be widely used. Most college textbooks aren't cheap.
I enjoy half.com--been getting textbooks and other stuff there for years and I've had great luck. I'm going to keep on doing that.
The problem with buying used textbooks is they revise them like every 1-2 years it seems. If you had a good professor, they took note of what changed, and would use and older version, or both versions. Most professors just told you to buy the most recent version thought, which would run $65. I'm sorry, Calculus really hasn't advanced much in the past year.
Now, the REALLY good professors would make copies of various literature, and send you over to the copy center to pick up a booklet that basically hit all the critical points of several textbooks, and the packet would usually run about $15.
@Saboth:
Most college textbook updates seem to be more visual than functional. Plus, college textbook manufacturers are including more multimedia materials which raise the price but are never used.
However, I know that in ever evolving areas like law, updates are inevitable. I had to essentially pay for a Business Law book twice in college when getting my accounting degree because there were some Uniform Commercial Code updates.
@Jesse:
Just to clarify, one version was for when I took a general Business Law class and the new version was for an Advanced course I took.
As a college student , I actually prefer to get the international editions, which I have found to be identical to the normal versions (though they are usually paperback, which is fine with me). I really hate the idea of renting books, because I like to think that purchasing the books for the lowest price (and NOT re-selling them) is one of the best ways to build a large knowledge base.
As an Example, here are my text book costs for this fall (Price in parens are Used Bookstore, and Rental):
Intermediate Macroeconomics: $42.98 ($118, 79)
Principles of Microeconmoics: $88 [2 books, $68 and $20] ($172 , $99)
Economics of Sports: $40 ($126, Unavailable)
20th&21st Century Literature: $64 (5 books, Including Watchmen by Alan Moore) ($151, Unavailable)
And then in the final class for this semester, I have a research-based class with no textbooks required.
Total bill: $234.98 from international editions and hitting online booksellers.
$567 from the bookstore;
and $294 if I rented the books I could rent.
Someone needs to come with a clever solution to this problem. As I'm not terribly clever, that someone will not be me. Hopefully the solution will arrive before I have kids in college.
@tgrwillki: I bought an internationaly copy of a textbook once and thought it was great. I prefered the paperback over the textbook...it was much easier to carry to class. The only problem though was that the paperback was completely in black & white so graphs and charts with many data points did not make a lot of sense.
Interesting...when I was in college, I had the unfortunate circumstance where a lot of my professors were authors or co-authors of the textbooks - so of course they required the most recent versions since they get a royalty from the sale.
@sleze69: @babyruthless: I was about to say that myself. They are the exact same books, at much cheaper prices, and no risk of running into chinese text. My sister bought a bunch of books from india when she went there as a student. I used half.com mostly.
I have heard of people checking out the textbook from the library and renewing all semester.
I would think some enterprising young college student might buck the system and put PDF scans of each chapter somewhere for others to use. Textbooks are a massive scam. Some colleges have gone so far as to ban students from doing book swap meets or otherwise reselling their books on campus that didn't involve the book store.
@Jesse:
I agree, most book "updates" were merely moving the same info to a different page or chapter. In one math class I had, the prof let us use the most recent version of the book, and the one before it. He would say "work on problems 1-6 on page 223 for edition 2 people, and work on problem 1-6 on page 234 for edition 3. The books were virtually identical except they moved some info around. A huge scam imo.
@bohemian:
there used to be a site called textbooktorrents.com where people would do just that -- either scan their textbooks to PDF (most of them were HIGH QUALITY scans) or they would acquire the PDF version of the text and strip any DRM from it. it was by far the best resource for textbooks for the longest time, but unfortunately the textbook industry discovered it and it no longer exists.
@bohemian: Doubtful unless they happen to have extra copies. Most major universities put course books "on reserve" which means they don't leave the library during the semester.
@Saboth: In business classes I discovered that the only real difference is that they would update the examples and case studies, but leave the actual text virtually untouched.
Is there any truth to the often heard rumor that professors somehow profit when they assign astronomically priced texts? Obviously they're paid for books they've written, but are the textbook companies romancing professors (schools or districts) the way pharmaceutical companies wine and dine doctors?
@Saboth:
Most professors just told you to buy the most recent version thought, which would run $65. I'm sorry, Calculus really hasn't advanced much in the past year.
I had a professor who had us use his book (ie, he wrote it), and he would release a new edition every semester at $90 a pop. As such, there were no used books, and the bookstores wouldn't give you anything for the one you had at the end of the semester.
It was entry-level financial accounting. How much does that change in 3 month's time? Ridiculous.
A cheaper source of textbooks would be nice. I paid over $800 for my textbooks last semester. Of course, it wasn't helped by the fact that my $300 Organic Chemistry textbook came out with a newer version by the time I tried to sell it back, and so the bookstore wouldn't take it. This is why I'm going to be in debt forever. Add that to my $50,000 a year I'm paying in tuition, and I'll be enslaved the rest of my life...
These "boutique" books -- which may excise certain material or add a professor's published papers -- come embossed with a warning that it's illegal to sell back as a used book.
How is this legal? It's not like you're purchasing a non-transferable license to use the book, you're purchasing the actual book.
In the eyes of the law, if you're copying music, burning CDs and giving them away (or distributing online), you're just as guilty as if you were charging for the burned CDs. If it's "illegal to sell [back as] a used book", what about giving the book to a friend? Is that also illegal? If that book were in the library, would the library be guilty of wanton infringement?
@Aquaria: Apparently the royalties most professors get from book sales are surprisingly small (unless they're THE authority in a field). That being said, most professors have huge ego's so of course the most current version of their book is the best in the field and they'd be doing you a disservice if they chose anything else.
@rpm773: That sort of scam really ought to be made against school policy. It's supposed to be an education, not a get-professor's-book-selling scheme.
@Liam Kinkaid: Not everything in EULAs is enforceable, and they can be thrown out in court. They're just betting no one will call them out on it, or that they'll have discouraged enough people for it to be worth it.
That may or may not be the case here, but I'm thinking it is.
@Liam Kinkaid: But will the publisher pay Amazon Kindle tech staff to slip into your house under cover of night and remove the book?
College is a massive scam to begin with. They make money contracting out the bookstore to companies like Barnes & Noble, so there is an incentive to perpetuate the textbook scam.
Plus, most of the crap taught is absolutely worthless. They force students to learn things they will never use. For example most schools force people to learn calculus. Unless you are going to be in a number crunching field calculus is useless, but these are the same institutions who are churning out grads who can't balance a checkbook or figure out the credit card company's usry rates.
The whole way the industry works smacks of corruption and sleaziness. The professors or schools do get kickbacks from certain publishers for using certain books or publishing houses, or they get free materials, etc. The just banned this kind of crap for doctors, but the future leaders of the free world get the shaft each semester-usually twice. First when you pay out an exorbitant price to get the book, and a second time when you find out they won't be buying back your book because of an "updated version" at the end of the semester.
@JulesNoctambule: Yeah, and while his per-book cut may have been small (per some posts below), my division had about 400 people in it, and I think he had 3 or 4 divisions per semester.
Good work if you can get it :P
@Attmay:
Agreed. I used Chegg for a couple of semesters and at the end of the second semester, when I mailed all my books back I got a phone call saying I hadn't mailed back one book. I was sure I had, so I called the CS line. They told me that they had, in fact, received the book, but my account hadn't been updated yet to reflect that. OK. Several days later I got the same call, and over and over and over. Finally a CSR offered to just take my phone number off of my account so they wouldn't call anymore.
How can you fix something so fundamentally unfair? Any sane method of distribution would be opposed by the retailers; any sane method of versioning would be opposed by the producers. Textbook companies gotta eat, but there's a fine line between stopping them from gouging students (which they do) and eliminating their incentive for producing them in the first place.
Outside of socializing the books, I got no solution.
It's been 21 years since I was in college, but my daughter is starting this semester. I figured I could use the net to find good deals on used textbooks or use the rental services. Nope.
The prices on used, current edition textbooks are all but fixed. With few exceptions, every online used book source (including Amazon, half.com, etc.) were within a few dollars of each other (or less once you figured in shipping).
As for the rental services, it does look like you can save a little money, but if you look at their rental prices for a semester, they boil down to ["fixed" used book price] - [How much you can sell the book back for at the end of the semester], so you really aren't saving anything.
One of the rental sites had a "fixed price for x number of books" deal that would have saved us money, but they didn't have two of the books she needed, which nulled the deal.
I told her to just get the books at the off-campus used bookstore, keep any she thought she might use later, and sell the rest at the end of the semester. She might try selling them herself rather than the crappy buy-back terms at the store, though.
Oh yeah, pay careful attention to assigned literature. One of her classes assigned "Siddhartha" by Herman Hesse. The bookstore had a $14.95 trade paperback (new) or a used copy at $9.96. You can find a pocket paperback of this book at any used bookstore for a $1 or so. Also, the book is apparently out of copyright so you can legally download the book in many different formats for free. The edition in the bookstore had no supplemental material of any importance. All of the rest of her assigned literature (not textbooks) were available used from Amazon for a few bucks each.
It's not a bad idea in theory but the way it's executed stinks. The cost to rent a textbook usually hovers around the same price it would cost to buy a used one - and if you choose that option, you can make most if not all of your money back reselling it again. With a rented textbook, its a guaranteed total loss. Add that to the fact that the companies who rent haven't received great reviews, and yeah... not worth it.
@Saboth: Here's what happens when I let my students use edition 5 or edition 6 (my text updates every five years or so):
"I read pages 55-67, but that's not what was on the test!" "Do you have edition 5 or 6?" "5." "You read the edition 6 pages, did you look at the chart showing which pages are for edition 5 and which are for edition 6?" "Yes, but it wasn't clear!" "How can it be more clear than a column saying edition 5 and a column saying edition 6?" "But there are two sets of page numbers! I didn't know which one to read!"
And then I say, "I don't care if you use edition 4, but you're on your own for page numbers; that edition was obsolete five years before I started teaching so I have no idea what's in it." And then students use it and get mad when particular material isn't in the text and demand to know why I don't give page numbers for edition one.
The whole thing makes me want to throw up my hands in despair.
(And I can't do the little booklets because we teach off a set of standard texts set by the department chair. I don't get to pick my books. I've been pushing, actually, to use Gutenberg texts and send them in a set to Lulu.com and give students the option of using the texts online, printing what they need, or buying the set at lulu for $15, but so far no sale. I teach almost nothing that's under copyright.)
When you're trying to get an out of print book, I found that it was much cheaper getting it from a campus bookstore. My campus bookstore had a clause in their contract saying that they needed to purchase and sell any book at list price if it was on the required reading list. The thermodynamics book I needed had been out of print for about 10 years, and it was a good book so prices were ~$200-$300. I went to the campus bookstore to see if they had a copy on the shelf, figuring I would bite the bullet and at least have the satisfaction of getting to inspect the book first. They didn't have it in stock, but said they would get the publisher to print me a new copy for list price, $100. Had to wait two weeks, but hell, saved more than my paycheck from the part time job I had on campus. I paid the least for my book in the entire class, the next cheapest was ~$150, and mine was new.
Don't know if it's unique to my bookstore, but check it out.
@ellemm:
I've been an economics professor for twenty years. I've received 1 t-shirt, a couple of coffee mugs, a number of pens and 1 dinner in all that time.
Some professors (not me) sell sample copies to book resellers for a few dollars. Of course, these would be the books they are not using.
@Skankingmike: Unfortunately, many colleges and professors are in on the scam, demanding "new editions" despite being different by about 20 words.
PDFs without DRM are the better choice. It's not just about new or old, copyright or cost.
Portability matters. Why carry around 20 pounds of books when you can carry weightless PDFs on your PDA or netbook?
@babyruthless: That's not true about old editions. Maybe for math books (the no homework condition would probably work fine), but for books where the point is to keep up to date on literature in a certain area, the editions and readings within them could be completely different.
I ALWAYS check with the prof to see whether I can go with an older edition.
@Maglet: I use half.com and amazon.com a lot, but right now I need one more book that's beyond my budget (I always forget about buying books, boo) and renting an older edition would only be $10. And it's a book I see myself selling back anyway, so why run the risk of BUYING an older edition I might never be able to sell back because - who knows - maybe an even newer edition will be out by that time.
If there is any justification to pirating books, this is it right here.
Calculus and statistics are necessary. Just because you don't recognize that you are doing it, doesn't mean it isn't necessary.
@JollyJumjuck: There used to be a college textbook (e-book) torrent tracker. As you can expect, it met it's demise after publishers got wind of it. People meticulously scanned pages of textbooks for others. It was beautiful.
@rpm773: As a university professor for over thirty years I feel I am in a good position to state that using requiring one's own text for a class you're teaching is just flat unethical -- unless you can dissociate yourself from the financial benefits (for example, by donating them back to the university). When I require my text I make the chapters available online for free.
Recently I've noticed more and more the classes that I take have more online courses in them. Well lthe online courses come in the form of a unique code that is included with the text books from the books store. They are able to include it with the used versions sold through them but not allowed to sell the code seperately.
Many of the old professors have been assigning books that can be bought online or at barnes and noble to students because of this but pretty much all of my younger teachers do it.
These aren't online classes either. Just regular classes that I have to go to these websites to do quizes and other homework.
I tried Chegg two semesters ago and I'll never try again. Customer service was nearly non-existent and they never sent me one of my books. I got my money back (after nearly a month) and had to find the book elsewhere. That's one out of the three books I ordered from them. The other two came on time. To me, not worth the trouble!